We Are Marshall

A true story of tragedy, hope, and resilience comes to the screen in this sports drama. Huntington, WV, is home to Marshall University, a school where college football is a way of life. Huntington is also a town that learned to deal with tragedy in the fall of 1970 when Marshall's "Thundering Herd" boarded an airliner to return home after a football game in North…
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Overview

A true story of tragedy, hope, and resilience comes to the screen in this sports drama. Huntington, WV, is home to Marshall University, a school where college football is a way of life. Huntington is also a town that learned to deal with tragedy in the fall of 1970 when Marshall's "Thundering Herd" boarded an airliner to return home after a football game in North Carolina. The jet crashed into a hill due to bad weather, and 75 members of Marshall's football squad and athletic staff died that night. The accident dealt a crippling blow to the city of Huntington, as well as Marshall's faculty and student body, and university president Donald Dedmon (David Strathairn) considered abandoning the school's football program. But instead Coach Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey) was recruited from Ohio's College of Wooster to rebuild Marshall's football program. Lengyel was not naïve about the task ahead of him, and working beside Red Dawson (Matthew Fox), an assistant coach who narrowly missed the doomed flight and was one of the program's only survivors, he came to understand his job was not just to put a team on the field, but help a college and a community heal their wounds from the tragic accident. Together Lengyel and Dawson turned a handful of rookies and second-string players into a competitive team who in 1971 showed the world what they could do in a legendary game against Marshall's rivals, Xavier University. Produced with the cooperation of Marshall University and filmed in part on their campus, We Are Marshall also stars Ian McShane, Anthony Mackie, and January Jones.

Editorial Reviews

All Movie Guide

Many sports movies blend together, relying as they do on inexperienced, undersized, or underfunded underdogs. We Are Marshall presents a different kind of underdog: a team built literally from ashes, as nearly the entire Marshall University football team was killed in a November 1970 plane crash. The story of the Marshall Thundering Herd was begging to be told, and McG gets it just right. The director known for his flashy approach to the Charlie's Angels movies, and for the abbreviated moniker that irks his detractors, shows exquisite maturity in handling this sober material, eliminating the bombast, but keeping the crispness and visual kineticism appropriate to a football movie. Of course, this is much more than a football movie. The Marshall plane crash realized the distant fears felt whenever an entire team boards an airplane together, and the aftermath predictably tore the school and the town apart. Matthew McConaughey's Jack Lengyel rightly observes that it doesn't matter whether the greenhorn Marshall players win, or even how they play, but that they play. This frees We Are Marshall from having to follow the structure of a typical sports film, letting it instead be about the unimaginable process of building a team from the ground up while the principles are deep in mourning. Playing a football coach, McConaughey has found a role perfectly suited to his mixture of playfulness and sincerity. He gives a warm, precise performance, never once phoning it in. Other standouts in the cast include Matthew Fox as the assistant coach who was supposed to be on the plane, Ian McShane as a prominent booster who lost a son in the crash, and Anthony Mackie as a player who missed the trip due to injury, whose grief-stricken passion is perfectly toned. That rush you feel whenever an undeterred crowd chants "We are Marshall!" is no manipulation. This is an intense story told with heart.

Scene Index

Disc #1 -- We Are Marshall 1. Herd Heartbreaker [5:24] 2. Homeward Bound [5:02] 3. Tragedy [7:31] 4. Collective Grief [3:45] 5. Proper Course of Action [4:18] 6. We Are Marshall [3:05] 7. Coach Search [4:28] 8. Maybe Jack Can Help [5:05] 9. First Time for Everything [5:13]10. Back on Track [3:49]11. I Should Have Been [2:18]12. Recruitment Drive [3:46]13. Only Man for the Job [3:54]14. Good-Looking Board [3:24]15. Football Fever [4:58]16. Veering Over to WVU [6:44]17. Season Opener [5:32]18. Scarring Memories [3:20]19. Not Honoring Them [4:40]20. That Was My Team [2:17]21. What This Is About [4:11]22. Like Every Other Team [4:01]23. What Day Is It? [1:52]24. All Out of Excuses [2:18]25. Heart on the Line [4:01]26. Kicking It [3:44]27. We're Gonna Be All Right [2:07]28. Second-Half Underdogs [4:20]29. Touchdown [4:17]30. Epilogue [4:41]31. End Credits [7:05]

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Disc #1 -- We Are Marshall Play Scenes Features Legendary Coaches Marshall Now Theatrical Trailer Languages Spoken Languages English 5.1 Français 5.1 Subtitles English English for the Hearing Impaired Français Español Off